Here in Wisconsin the question people who have tired of Dems get the most is, ‘Why aren’t you voting for Russ Feingold?’

After all, it’s presumed he’s liberal, and if you’re a liberal, you must like Russ, right? He’s a stalwart individualist, a socially liberal, fiscally conservative, one of a kind Senator and we should be happy to have him out there working for liberal interests.

Well… no. Because, see, I actually *am* a liberal, and Russ is an opportunistic turncoat who likes to mouth the platitudes and then vote against our interests whenever it actually counts.

Here’s Senator Feingold’s schtick: he paints himself in all things as a Principled Iconoclast by casting meaningless protest votes, some of which he arranges himself, when it won’t make any difference to the outcome. Then, when important votes come up, where he could adhere to his putative principles, he quietly flips and gets in line.

You can see this pattern over and over and over again.

Here are some handy and recent examples:

–Russ Feingold loves his public image as a staunch defender of civil liberties. If he was, though, why did he vote to confirm Elena Kagan, a virtual cipher whose only well known legal positions are in favor of expaning Executive power?

Answer: Because it was a close vote. Kagan was only confirmed 63-37.

–Russ Feingold loves to cast himself as a fiscal conservative, a careful steward of the public funds. So why did he vote to reconfirm Ben Bernanke as Fed Chairman, after his grotesque failure to protect the economy, leading to the massive bailouts of the big banks?

Answer: Because the Administration wanted him reconfirmed.

–If Russ Feingold is big on fiscal conservatism, why did he vote in favor of the Obamacare health debacle (twice) which will see health care costs continue to soar year after year? For that matter, why did he vote for a bill that uses the force of government to seize private assets and hand them over to big corporations with no real guarantee on their providing any service at all, let alone a quality one?

Answer: Because it was a *very* close vote, and if he had stood up for, say, the majority of Americans who wanted a public option or some, heck, any method to contain costs instead of opening up their veins to the health insurance cartels, they might have gotten it.

–Why did civil liberties loving Russ Feingold vote for the above bill when it dramatically restricts the right to choose and makes women into second class citizens with regard to their health care?

Answer: Because President Obama needed a victory. Aren’t you following along?

‘But’, your hypothetical inquistor might ask, ‘what about all the good things he’s voted for?’ Well… yes, Feingold is good at finding ways to cast meaningless votes that are good for PR. Sometimes he even invents the opportunities himself.

For example, here’s Feingold voting against the up-to-100 billion dollar bailout of the IMF. That was a real act of courage and risk to the Administration’s agenda all right – it passed 91-5.

(The way the bill worked was the Administration extended a massive, 108 billion dollar line of credit to the IMF and then said the risk was so low that they only had to set aside 5 billion to cover our chances. Witness Media Matters tap-dance on that one)

Sometimes, however, symbolic but meaningless votes don’t just present themselves to Russ, so he has to invent them. Here’s the vote on Feingold’s proposed amendment to an appopriations bill, aimed at forcing the Administration to actually come up with plan to get out of Afghanistan.

It failed spectacularly, 18-80.

But, but, Feingold voted to end the war!

*rolls eyes*

Feingold himself is outright proud of his symbolic actions that have no real world impact whatsoever. Check this out, from his campaign website:

I opposed many Bush Administration policies that ignored the Constitution and the rule of law. In September 2008, I held a hearing to urge the next President to make restoring the rule of law a top priority. In early 2009, I issued a 100-day Report Card to assess the progress made by the Obama administration on this front.

Ooh yes, how’d that work out for you?

The ‘report card’ is a laugh riot – in order to avoid having to condemn very much, most of the grades are ‘Incompletes’. Bonus: he claims that Obama ended US torture by the military and let the Red Cross see all our prisoners.

You know, except for the black site we still operate at Bagram, where torture and a lack of accountability have gone on even during the Obama Administration. Highlights of the torture Feingold says Obama stopped (but really didn’t) include:

The detainees reported being forced into nudity and humiliated upon arrival, malnourishment resulting from inadequate and foul-smelling food, sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation resulting from cold temperatures and inadequate bedding. They reported being blindfolded and shackled when leaving their cells and losing complete track of the time and date. The International Committee of the Red Cross was also reportedly denied access to the detainees and the secret facility.

Yessir, that’s some great accountability Feingold provided us.

And then there’s Feingold’s signature, deficit cutting set of Big Ideas to reduce ‘wasteful government spending’.

What would those be? Perhaps, say, targeting the half trillion dollars a year the Pentagon gets?

Well… no. Short of cutting a few useless military programs, Russ is fine with that.

He does want to cut NASA funds though, and end a radio broadcast to Cuba. That’s something, right?

This is the story of Russ Feingold in a nutshell: big, symbol rich talk, but very small ideas, and conveniently they never get in the way of him voting against his supposed principles. Reconfirm Bernanke? Sure. Put Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court? Why not. Force the IRS to funnel taxpayer dollars via a backdoor tax to Wellpoint? Yep!

But man, if you need someone to stand up and rail against something that is a shoe-in like the IMF bailout attached to a war supplemental, or alternately, to push an idea that has no chance to pass? Russ will be right there in the limelight.

Unless he loses tomorrow, here in Wisconsin. Personally, I don’t care much one way or the other; his opponent’s an insufferable twit who sounds like he’s a few (dozen) IQ points short of a MENSA meeting.

But I’m not going to vote for him either.

Since Wisconsin has same-day registration for voting, I’ve had the luxury of delaying a decision on whether or not to bother voting at all in this, the lousiest and least appealing election I’ve ever seen, until the very end. After looking over the sample ballot and weighing my options, I have decided to go perform my civic duty.

But not because I’m voting for a single Democrat, as it happens.

No, the reason I’m going out to the polls is much simpler: we have a couple of ballot initiatives up for voting this year here in the Madison area. One’s on medical marijuana, and one is for a big bond issue for the MATC, a Wisconsin two-year college/system. Both are worth showing up.

None of the Democrats on the ballot are, though.

Let’s start with Barrett. On the surface, Barrett’s supposedly a nice guy; he’s most famous nationally for getting the hell beaten out of him by a thug with a tire iron when he tried to stop said thug from attacking a woman in an alley.

Politically, however, Barrett has some really questionable ideas. Running as a Democrat, his biggest platform plank is to cut a huge chunk out of the state budget; he calls this ‘Putting Madison on a Diet’.

Because what we really need in a depression is to dramatically cut government spending.

Worse still is the manner in which he intends to do this; like his party’s leader, President Obama, Barrett plans to do this in part by coercing poor people into getting lousy health insurance.

Seriously. From his own campaign PDF on this ‘plan’:

Giving BadgerCare Plus Enrollees an Incentive to Select Low-Cost Plans. Now most
BadgerCare enrollees get to choose among competing HMOs, but have no incentive to
select a lower-cost HMO. By giving BadgerCare enrollees a clear, strong economic
incentive to enroll in lower-cost plans — such as charging higher monthly premiums
for BadgerCare Plus enrollees to select a more costly plan and lower premiums
for less costly ones – the state gives the HMOs a reason to lower their prices.
Estimated annual savings: $200 million.2

For those outside Wisconsin, Badgercare Plus is basically Wisconsin’s way of providing health insurance to people too poor for Medicaid but who can’t get insurance through their employer. Barrett wants to slash costs there by charging poor people higher premiums for ‘more costly’ plans, ie, plans that cover your actual medical needs.

Functionally this works just like the Excise tax in the odious Obamacare health bill, only here it’s explicitly targeted at the poor and lower middle class. Cheers!

Barrett also plans to slash health care spending for prisoners, claiming that they get ‘Cadillac’ coverage in jail.

Which is a blatant lie. From the Isthmus:

Barrett, meanwhile, is pandering to popular prejudice against prison inmates by promising to end the “Cadillac health care” services.

The campaign claims it can shave up to $14 million a year in medical services to prisoners — far less than a drop in the state’s $31 billion budget bucket — but does not specify what services would be cut (and did not respond to a request for more information). All evidence suggests the health care provided state prison inmates (at a total cost of just $57.5 million this year, an average of $2,600 per inmate) does not include a lot of frills like aromatherapy and acupuncture.

For instance, a 2009 state audit found that only four of the state’s adult institutions met nationally recommended staffing ratios for prison psychologists. And in August, a settlement was reached between the state and American Civil Liberties Union requiring improvements in health care at Taycheedah, the state’s largest women’s prison.

News reports said the prison had only a part-time physician for its 700 inmates; the settlement requires it to have one full-time doc. How much opportunity does that leave Barrett to chip away at Cadillac care?

Leaving aside the fact that he’s demagoguing on the extremely limited healthcare provided to prisoners and outright lying about its quality, how precisely does Barrett think he can implement this master plan, when the ACLU is already whipping Wisconsin’s ass in court on our CURRENT levels of inadequate staffing?

Barrett’s approach to staffing extends to the rest of the government, though. His ingenious diet plan includes, in essence, not filling vacant state positions as people retire.

Which I’m sure will do wonders for backlogs:

Finally, Tom will ‘right-size’ the state work force. We need to create a state employee
workforce plan to mitigate the impact of a large number of retiring workers that we can expect
over the next decade. The state already reviews positions as they become vacant and has been
working to reduce staffing costs by “right sizing” and reducing middle management. However, a
more proactive approach would include introducing technologies and revising processes to lessen
the need for replacement employees, with an explicit requirement to limit the use of higher priced
contractors. By increasing efficiency through improved use of technology and reengineering
business processes, we can achieve a significant decrease in the rate at which the state replaces
retiring employees. Estimated annual savings: $34 million.18

Barrett’s penny-pinching doesn’t stop there. He’s positively anal when it comes to technology issues, imagining huge savings from migrating to your standard ‘revolutionary’ technologies like VOIP and.. thin clients.

Seriously.

Moving to Thin Client technology. Michigan recently changed 27,000 state employees
over to Thin Client Technology – which replaces normal PCs with cheaper devices
relying on remote processing capacity – and is saving between $3 million and $5 million
within its first year of operation. For a state Wisconsin’s size, that would provide
estimated annual savings of $2.1 million.

Thin clients are a complete and utter joke, a rebranding of the far more accurate term ‘dumb terminal’. There’s a reason nobody in the ‘real world’ wants to use them, and it’s because they’re far more trouble than they’re worth. Slow, limited in functionality, virtually impossible to upgrade and often proprietary, thin clients are only as useful as the ‘remote processing capacity’ they are completely reliant upon to function.

There’s a good reason the world runs on PCs now, and Tom Barrett obviously never learned it. Here, I’ll let the Bastard Operator from Hell explain why using machines like these is a bad idea in a work environment:

“These network computers are great,” he gasps, flashing a glossy brochure.

“And why is that?” I ask.

“Because they act just like PCs without disks,” he cries. “They’re good because everything they need to operate is loaded from the computer.”

“Sort of like a dumb terminal, with graphic and sound capabilities.”

“Uh… no, much faster, and in colour.”

“So it’s a bit like changing a black and white TV for a colour one.”

“Uh… Not exactly.”

“So we’re going to move from independent computers to ones dependent on a server – like ASCII terminal days. So when the main machine is down, no work gets done. Isn’t that why we got desktop machines?”

“Ahhhh… No, not really.”

“Oh. So they’re different from, say, an NCD in what way?”

“Because we’ll never need to upgrade the equipment. It’ll be like your colour TV set,” the boss blurts triumphantly. “Once you’ve got one, it’ll never need upgrading – just upgrade the server software.”

“Not even when the software grows and needs more memory?”

“No.”

“Not even when the software wants to make use of whizzy new features like Nicam stereo, Dolby surround, and wide screen?”

Barrett’s platform is full of this sort of nonsense, a series of magic bullets that are already held out as ridiculous by most of the civilized world, but hey, maybe they’ll work here and save us a mint!

He even, and I swear to the dark Gods, believes in the ‘paperless office’ concept, which is properly discussed alongside other mythological concepts like centaurs and unicorns.

Reducing paper use and going “paperless.” There’s a reason state employees are
sometimes referred to as paper pushers – government sometimes seems to run on the
stuff. However, in our increasingly electronic world, more information is shared through
email and file sharing, research is conducted and records kept electronically, information
is provided to consumers on-line, and transactions are processed there as well. As
Governor, Tom will require all agencies to examine their processes to look for ways to
“go paperless” – or at least move to “paper on demand.”

He even presents the idea of remotely turning off computers, ie ‘power management solutions’, as a major initiative.

Brother.

Other Barrett ideas include shuttering many state offices one day a week (thus yet again gouging state employee’s paychecks while adding to the backlog at offices – I hope you like your DMV lines!) and wasting money on ethanol while building offices on contaminated land:

Buying only the most fuel efficient vehicles for the state fleet and purchasing
home grown fuels whenever possible.
o Encouraging the redevelopment of Brownfields sites for re-use as office parks
when they are located in areas that are already connected to water, electricity and
roads.

This is our Democratic candidate for governor, ladies and gentlemen. Obsessed with magic bullet technologies, full of proposals to slash public worker pay, pensions and benefits, convinced that cutting jobs in a recession will somehow promote economic recovery. Barrett wants to balance budgets on the backs of public servants, and while he has proposals to cut down on tax cheats, he certainly doesn’t want to raise taxes on the wealthy, heavens no. It’s better that state offices close 20% of the time and that we don’t replace retiring staff, while we simultaneously abuse prisoners with even more medieval health care than the ACLU already beat Wisconsin’s attempts to defend in court.

As bad as Barrett’s positions are, his campaign has been worse. Both Barrett and his Republican counterpart, Scott Walker, have been serial liars to an astonishing degree, as the Isthmus described in a recent feature article:

This is, of course, how politics is often played — constant friction over accusations, traded back and forth. There’s just one small problem with this approach, and, ironically enough, it’s something that creates a common bond between the two contenders: They’re lying.

They’re lying about how terrible they regard the other to be. They’re lying when they heap blame on each other for vast problems they know have multiple causes. And they’re lying about the claims they make about themselves.

…

So the bad news is they’re lying. The good news is they’ve been caught –– on many occasions, and by many different observers.

On top of all his bad policies, Tom Barrett’s a serial liar.

He’s one very good reason I’m not voting Democratic this year.

There’s a very good reason why we don’t invest anything retirement wise in the stock market; it’s not just a casino. It’s a rigged casino, and the people who’ve rigged it are about to cash out, big time:

The overwhelming volume of sell transactions relative to buy transactions by company insiders over the last six months in key leading sectors of the market is the worst Alan Newman, editor of the Crosscurrents newsletter, has ever seen since he began tracking the data.

…

The largest companies in three of the most important leading sectors of the market have seen their executives classified as insiders sell more than 120 million shares of stock over the last six months. Top executives at these very same companies bought just 38,000 shares over that same time period, making for an eye-popping sell to buy ratio of 3,177 to one.

…

The insider data “is good reason for considerable caution once the price action fades,” said Simon Baker, CEO of Baker Asset Management. Still “insiders normally buy early and sell early too. Longer term — 12 months out — it is more of a red flag.”

So to recap: the bigwigs running corporate America are cashing out as fast as humanly possible, and the bigger their company, the faster they are doing so.

Yeah. If you’ve got any money at all in this three card monte exercise, I’d recommend getting out now.